Mix Tape

by Jane Sanderson

  She listened, and she didn’t reply. She thought he’d gone mad. There was a time when Alison acted upon every piece of advice that her brother gave her, because he was generally right. But now he was being irrational, he’d see that himself in a day or two, and whatever he said, she was going nowhere for the next twelve months. He could give her the escape fund this time next year, if he wished, or he could spend it on himself. Either way, come September next year, she’d be gone.

  Peter went out, just for an hour or so, he said, but he didn’t say where and Alison didn’t ask. Toddy’s probably. She hoped so anyway, she hoped Peter could count on him to help him through the next few weeks and months. She washed up, then fetched the heap of photographs from the living-room mantelpiece, and burned them one at a time, dropping them into a metal bucket where they bucked and curled and shrank to harmless black remnants. Martin had the negatives, of course, but unless he planned to try and sell them to the Sheffield Telegraph there wasn’t much more damage he could do with them.

  The kitchen stank of acrid smoke so she went upstairs to her room, and lay down on the bed. She felt better for having eaten, but she was exhausted, bone-weary. She thought about Daniel at the Mayflower Club, opening the gig, warming up the crowd, sharing a bill with Joy Division and the Fall, and she wished she was there, the girl in the band, harmonising with bad boy Steve Levitt. Oh well, she thought, there’d be a next time; she’d make sure of it: she’d make them forgive her.

  She reached for the radio and turned it on, and if she hadn’t done that, she might have heard the door as Martin let himself into the house. Donna Summer filled the room, ‘Bad Girls’, toot toot, beep beep, not quite what Alison was in the mood for, but you took your chances on Radio 1 on a Saturday night. She was on her bed, eyes closed, dropping like a stone into sleep, when he entered her bedroom, and even then she didn’t hear him immediately because he was sober and had taken the precaution of removing his boots at the bottom of the stairs. Then she sensed a presence, a malevolence in the room, and she opened her eyes, but it was too late and everything that happened next did so in a fearful, uncontrollable rush, a worst nightmare, a horror story. He was at her and on her, monstrous and full of hatred, dragging her off the bed by the hair, gagging her with a scarf he’d brought for the purpose, ripping at her dress, her pants, her bra, tearing into her with silent determination. He said nothing at all but she screamed fit to fetch all the street in until the gag silenced her fury, then she fought like a lynx, scratched and kicked, but she was slight and he was a heavy brute, and he pinned her body to the floor, crushed her into submission, one hand round her throat, the other clutching her hair, and like this he was able to thrust into her, over and over, calling her bitch, cunt, bitch, cunt, to the steady rhythm of his violence. He took his time, so she could fully understand the depths of his loathing, the extent of her helplessness. When it was over, he laughed. Then he stood, zipped himself up, and prodded one foot experimentally into her side and then again into her abdomen, as if she’d just been washed up on a beach and he wasn’t certain what she was. He stared for a few moments at her nakedness, and the marks he’d made on her skin. Then he hawked and spat in her face, to remind her of her own sin, and then he left. All of this took less than ten minutes, and Peter came back home, as he’d said he would, an hour after leaving, thirty minutes after Martin Baxter had let himself out of the house.

  Even so, by then, Alison was gone. She’d allowed herself no time to cry and cringe and wallow; all that was done now. She’d washed, dressed and buried her ripped dress in the bottom of the kitchen bin. Then she’d left a note for Peter, just a scrawl; she hadn’t mentioned Martin or what he’d done, because that would start a whole new chain of events and give the foul act more weight and substance, make it harder to forget. She would not, she absolutely would not, take anyone down with her into despair, especially not her brother, so all she wrote was: ‘Dear Peter, you were right, I can’t stay here, love Alison xx’, and then she packed a few possessions into her canvas satchel: the passport and the money, some clothes, and the mix tape, the only one she had, The Best Last Two, from Daniel.

  For him, she left nothing at all – there wasn’t time, and there was too much to say. She’d write to him when she could. She’d write to him, and he’d come to her, and then they’d never have to part again.

  20

  EDINBURGH,

  24 JANUARY 2013

  At Waverley Station, Katelin clung uncharacteristically on to Dan when they hugged goodbye, and told him she suddenly felt shaky about being so long away from home, and he said a large gin and tonic on the train would soon steady her nerves, but she didn’t smile.

  ‘Seriously,’ she said. ‘I think I’m going to be homesick.’

  He held her at arm’s length and looked into her eyes while she waited for reassurance. ‘You won’t, Katelin, I guarantee it,’ he said. ‘You’ll be with Rose-Ann for a start, and you’ll be seeing and doing way too much to pine for rainy old Stockbridge.’

  ‘Will you miss me?’ she asked, and he wished she hadn’t, because he could hardly say no, and he really disliked being manipulated. However, ‘You bet,’ he said, because it was easier, and kinder. ‘But,’ he added quickly, ‘you’re not going to miss me, you’re going to have a blast.’

  Now she did smile, and drew back. A little way down the platform, Duncan and Rose-Ann were in close conversation. Katelin regarded them for a moment; then she said, ‘Keep an eye on him for her, won’t you?’ and Dan’s smile immediately faded and he said, ‘Ah, don’t ask that of me, Katelin.’

  ‘No, but he looks up to you,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not his keeper.’

  ‘No, I know, but he listens to you, you know he does.’

  ‘Rose-Ann has no cause for concern,’ Dan said. ‘Duncan hasn’t seen or spoken to Lindsay since before Christmas, she doesn’t want him, and he doesn’t need her.’

  ‘Yeah, OK,’ Katelin said.

  ‘Get on that train and don’t look back,’ he said. ‘Seize the next few weeks, and really make them count,’ and he meant it, he truly wanted only the best experience for her, he wanted this trip to be a high point in her life, but he also knew he was hiding his own profound unease, because he wasn’t immune to the crashing irony of being asked to keep Duncan on the straight and narrow.

  God knows, he was not the man for that job. In the weeks and then days in the run-up to Katelin’s departure, he’d begun to feel perpetually disorientated, as feelings and events of another lifetime gained ground on him, while Katelin – blameless, entirely blameless – continued blithely on in their present. He longed, now, for her to leave. Yesterday the house had been mayhem, a vortex of paraphernalia and low-level panic, all the various stages of her packing, the details and documents relating to her imminent departure, the choosing of suitcase and cabin bag, the piles of clothes for sunshine, for cooler nights, for rain. He’d done his best, tried to help, dug out some adaptors for US sockets, then Alison had sent him an Arctic Monkeys track, ‘Do I Wanna Know?’, and off he went, spinning down the time tunnel, back to Nether Edge 1979 – although, actually, his first thought had been damn, because he obviously should have sent that song to her – he could hear his own thoughts coming back at him through Alex Turner’s lyrics, and in a Sheffield accent, too. After that he’d had to drag himself back to Stockbridge and the matter in hand, and Katelin had given him that look, the one that told him she knew he was somehow absent, until he’d shaken himself out of the past and given her 100 per cent of his attention, on this big day, the day before she left.

  So he felt like a heel, but all he really understood was that he needed a resolution, he had it in his sights, and for his own sanity, and for all the unanswered, tormented questions of the past, he was going to use Katelin’s extended absence to find Alison Connor, and stand in front of her, and then see what happened next. He kissed Katelin goodbye, his dear partner, for whom he really did wish nothing but happiness. Then, as the
train moved away from the station, his wayward, ungovernable thoughts went straight back to Alison, and the way her face had always nestled hotly against his neck when they embraced, and she’d breathed him in as though she needed him to stay alive. And the sense he had of Alison’s remembered physical presence was stronger, somehow, than the sense he had of Katelin, who only moments ago had been right here, beside him. Alison Connor was intangible yet concrete, unreal yet hyper-real at one and the same time. A head rush, a total fucking head rush; it was like nothing else he’d ever felt.

  The train was gone, and the two men bounded up the steps to Waverley Bridge, and it crossed Dan’s mind to talk to his friend, as he knew he should, about his lost and found love in Adelaide. But in all honesty, he really didn’t want to, and anyway it was easy enough to postpone that conversation, since Duncan was talking nineteen to the dozen about the artists he had in mind for the industry-dominating music-promotion company he believed he and Dan were founding together. Dan was right off the idea – he was too busy, Duncan was too idealistic, and the market was already too tightly sewn up – but he hadn’t told Duncan yet, because his friend was so full of energy and verve that he hadn’t the heart. Duncan had a list of three contenders: the Anstruther fisherman Willie Dundas; a band called Truth Bites Back, a solid enough outfit comprising four guys from Leith who owed everything – the look, lyrics, riffs, rhythms – to Aztec Camera; and an interesting pair of twin sisters from Largs, Katriona and Jeanie McBride, who sang in eerie harmony about drugs, sex and urban decay, with a palpably disdainful attitude that made them oddly compelling. They were far and away the most bankable proposition on Duncan’s notional books, Dan had known that the night he first heard them, dragged along by his pal to a small, underpopulated room at the Paisley Union. They had a thin, wasted look, big eyes in pale faces, scruffy plaits, studs in their noses, eyebrows, lips – anywhere but the earlobes. Both wore their guitars slung low so they had to hunch their skinny shoulders to play. Katriona yawned into the mic at one point, but the yawn melted into the words of the song, so it might have been intentional. They were languid, laconic and clever and in the right hands the McBrides could be everywhere. They called themselves Jeanie and the Kat, another little stroke of genius.

  Still, though, there were some mightily effective publishers and promoters out there already, with everything in place to propel a savvy, talented, edgy pair of musicians straight into global recognition, so it was a bit of a leap to imagine Duncan somehow emerging overnight as a contender, even if he could already lay claim to having discovered this pair. After all, this was dear, clueless Duncan Lomax, who spent his days playing music in a record shop, blowing dust off the stylus in the listening booth, drinking coffee with customers who might, or more often might not, buy a record. In all the years he’d owned this shop he’d never bothered to have a website built, never bothered to put his stock online, so that a person who was looking for, say, some early Status Quo, or a white vinyl special edition of Sound and Vision, had to get to Edinburgh, talk to Duncan, and wait in hope while he fished through all the likely boxes. So, it was evident to Dan that not only were they too late to this party, but also, they were ill-equipped to join it, and the very best advice they could give the McBride sisters was to sign up with an existing company, get a buzz going, build a digital presence, and hope it translated to the big time.

  Duncan’s shop was at the top end of Jeffrey Street and although that’s where he should’ve been headed, and despite being way too early in the day for a drink, he’d argued a strong case in favour of stopping for a beer in a new craft-ale bar, all industrial chic, with bare brick and scaffolding on the inside and benches made from stacked railway sleepers. They’d bought a couple of German wheat beers from a serious, bearded young man in a long brewer’s apron, then Dan decided the time was now and said, ‘Look, I have to say, buddy, it’s a complete non-starter,’ and Duncan’s smile faded to dismay.

  ‘Wha’?’ he said, his glass of beer halted on its way to his mouth.

  ‘We don’t have the skills, man,’ Dan said. ‘Or the time. Well, I don’t.’

  Duncan stared with hurt eyes, as if this was the biggest let-down of his life.

  ‘Have you looked online?’ Dan said. ‘Have you seen what’s out there already, for new artists? They don’t need a label to pick them up any more, there’s stacks of companies they can go to, get a publishing deal, royalties tracked, money for YouTube views, live performances administered, no strings or tie-ins, wham-bam, hello success.’

  ‘So?’ Duncan said. ‘We could do that, you and me.’

  ‘No, we couldn’t.’

  ‘Aw c’mon, dude, we’re the real deal, we live and breathe this world.’

  ‘It’s not enough to love music, Dunc, you got to do the admin too, and be clued up on tech skills.’

  ‘But my guys aren’t signed up with anybody.’

  ‘No, I know.’

  ‘So we create a company to represent ’em, and get cracking.’

  Dan sighed. Katelin was right about Duncan looking up to him and, certainly, it was like talking to a kid sometimes; he should never have encouraged him in the first place. Well, he wasn’t sure he had encouraged him, it was rather that he hadn’t discouraged him, which amounted to the same thing with Duncan.

  ‘I’m just not able to commit to this right now,’ Dan said. ‘It’d need a hundred per cent effort.’

  ‘What you so flat out with?’

  ‘Usual stuff, plus a potential book contract – I’m seeing a publisher next week – and I said yes to this offer from Six Music, the new music panel – I told you about it? Jesus, Duncan. Don’t make me account for myself.’

  ‘Look,’ Duncan said. ‘Let’s just give it a year, see how we go? Those wee lassies, they’re awesome.’

  Dan nodded. ‘They are, they really are. They need some representation, for sure.’

  ‘So?’

  Dan shook his head. ‘You do it,’ he said. ‘I’ll watch.’

  ‘You might end up famous for being the man who said no to Jeanie and the Kat.’

  ‘A risk I’m going to have to take,’ Dan said. He knew what Duncan would be thinking though: that if he, Dan, didn’t want in, it probably wasn’t as good an idea as he’d thought. Duncan believed Dan knew what he was doing, never put a foot wrong, made only good decisions that didn’t land him in the soup.

  He really should tell him all about Ali Connor, Dan thought. He almost did, drew in his breath ready to speak, got right to the very edge of it. But then he didn’t.

  Back at home McCulloch staggered at him with demented happiness, as if he’d believed he was to be forever alone. He whined and threaded himself in a frantic figure of eight, in and out of Dan’s feet, and Dan stooped to briefly scratch the little dog’s ears, then he stood up again and said, ‘That’s your lot,’ and McCulloch, who fully understood the rules, immediately composed himself and settled for simply shadowing Dan’s every move.

  ‘Just you and me now,’ Dan said to the dog. He put the coffee pot on in the kitchen and switched on the radio, retuning it with some satisfaction to 6 Music from the wall-to-wall dialogue of Katelin’s preferred Radio 4. Huey Morgan immediately joined him in the room, his Lower East Side drawl taking Dan straight back in time to a basement club in St Mark’s Place, mid-nineties, tiny stage, banging music, sticky floor, dim red lights, a long night of revelry with the Fun Lovin’ Criminals. God, they’d tied one on that night. Every time he heard Huey on the radio he could smell fresh fried donuts, yet he couldn’t recall eating any at the time. The theory of Proust’s madeleines gone awry.

  He poured himself a coffee and climbed the stairs to his office, McCulloch panting along valiantly behind him, in a house that was filled with a new and very welcome silence. Upstairs, the dog flung himself on to his blanket and Dan switched on the Mac and pulled Twitter on to his screen, to check out @AliConnorWriter, see what she’d been saying, which turned out to be nothing, as, to be honest, was of
ten the case. He got the distinct impression she was part of this particular social media circus at the insistence of a publicist, or her publisher, because her heart clearly wasn’t in it. The last tweet from her had been a couple of weeks ago, raving about a young singer in Adelaide, and Dan had googled her – Tahnee Jackson, he loved that name, that name alone could earn her a record deal, but she was a songbird too, and beautiful, exotic, different.

  He tapped the direct message icon, and scooted quickly through their thread of songs, fourteen so far, very few in the scheme of things, yet look where it had led him: right back to her, so that she was now his daily waking thought. Where she was, how she was, who she was – these were his obsessions. He’d lined up a track for her by Richard Hawley, a Sheffield bloke with a great line in nostalgic yearning, which seemed to fit the bill. He sent ‘Open Up Your Door’, and hoped she’d get the connection, because every album this guy made honoured their city, and his music was gorgeous, you could dissolve at the sound of his voice. Then he thought: Right, OK, flights to Adelaide, but still somehow dragged his feet, because, well, it was a mighty leap from brilliant concept to hard reality, and although he knew for sure he was going to go – and without telling her, so she didn’t have a chance to scarper – he just needed to think it through: the distance, the deceit, his chances of success, the vast, yawning, unknowable abyss of the future.

  Then his phone rang, the screen filling with the name of the caller, Terri Nichols, an industry publicist, and by startling coincidence the very woman who once sent Dan to the East Village to get hammered with Huey.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ Dan said when he answered.

  ‘Why, thank you, darling,’ Terri said with a laugh in her voice.

  ‘I was just listening to the Huey show on the radio, remembering that trip.’

  ‘Hey, like they say, if you remember it, you probably weren’t there.’